Web Site Promotion

Search engines are the main way most people initially find web sites.
The main other ways are word-of-mouth referrals, links from web sites,
e-mail marketing and advertising.

Having found a site, most people return through bookmarks, links or
a direct type-in of the URL.

Web site traffic can be boosted by:

increasing the number of new visitors

increasing return visits

There are five sources of potential traffic building, that result from
search engines:

free listings in search results eg. Google

free listings in directories eg. DMOZ

paid listings in directories eg Yahoo

paid listings in search engines. Also known as PFI - Pay For Inclusion
listings eg Alta Vista and Inktomi

pay per click - PPC - listings in search engines. These appear as the top 3 results in certain search engines. eg. a Top
3 position in Overture results in a Top 3 position in Yahoo

Advertising is an expensive method of new visitor and new customer acquisition. In contrast, free referrals from search engines and directories, word-of-mouth, web site links and web promotion are very inexpensive.

Businesses can spend $1,000 or more on advertising to acquire one customer yet virtually ignore the almost free methods of referrals from search engines and directories, word-of-mouth, web site links and web promotion.

The first step in boosting web site traffic is to analyze your site traffic to understand how visitors reach your site and what they do when they are there.

All too frequently, web pages are unable to be optimally indexed by search engines. Each engine has different requirements and rules for correct indexing. Web designers and their clients often do not know the rules or how to apply them. Sometimes they ignore them as some rules limit their creativity. As an example, framed pages cause indexing problems for search engines.

Your site may require frames so it can perform certain functions so does this mean your pages can never be well indexed? The answer is no - there are a number of "workaround" strategies which can be employed to overcome these problems.

With more than 3 billion web pages on the Internet, how well do your pages get found by the search engines?

While free traffic is an essential starting point for building your site traffic, pay per click traffic is immediate and, if carefully managed, can be highly profitable. If your business is one where repeat sales the cornerstone of long term viability of your website, then PPC is for you. PPC involves bidding on keywords and keyword phrases in engines such as Overture and Google Adwords.

These generally work well for as long as you pay and are excellent for marketing campaigns. Of course the free search engine listings work 24 hours per day, every day. PPC and Paid Keywords should supplement the free listing strategy and not be a substitute.

Getting listed correctly in free search engines and directories will improve site traffic, sales leads and brand awareness. This takes an in-depth understanding of search engines and directories, web design, your company's products (features and benefits) and your web markets. The Internet Marketing Engine recommends a more conservative, long term approach to search engine indexing which forms part of your web marketing plan. The results will be nearly as good over the short term and have a high degree of success over the long term.